AGONY
AFTER HIS CONVICTION on the evening of January 26, 1944, and a brief farewell to Dieter Berger and his former commanding officers on U-103, Oskar Kusch was driven back to the Naval Detention Center at the Wik naval compound where he would be held in Cell No. 107 for the next 106 days. The prison had a total of 104 cells of which four were in the basement. Most of the inmates were kept in solitary confinement awaiting final disposition of their cases.1
While his file made its way slowly through the prescribed review process, and after Karl-Heinrich Hagemann’s formal explanation and justification of the verdict had been added to it on January 31, Kusch quickly learned that his daily activities from then on would be tightly controlled by Marineoberstabsrichter Ernst Meinert. He was the official charged with making sure Kusch’s sentence was properly carried out in conformity with military regulations. To assert that Meinert became Kusch’s prime nemesis in those final days and may have contributed to blocking a possible commutation of his prisoner’s sentence, would be a vast understatement.
Ernst Meinert, as so many men in the naval justice system, was a North German born in 1909 near the city of Elmshorn northwest of Hamburg. After his Abitur in 1929 he studied law at universities as far away as Geneva in Switzerland and Grenoble in France. In 1935 he passed his first and in 1939 his second state exam. As a Kriegsmarine reservist, he was incorporated into the naval justice administration in 1940, with assignments primarily in Norway and after March 1943 at the H.K.U.’s military court in Kiel.2 As a member of the Nazi storm troopers, he was incorporated into the party itself on May 1, 1937. He claimed after the war his membership grew from purely utilitarian considerations because an ascent into the judicial hierarchy “without a touch of brown varnish” seemed difficult. He also freely admitted to having taken over the Nazi propaganda line on the causes, nature, and goals of the war, something quite evident in his record when acting as a prosecutor and judge. He thought it his obligation “to contribute [his] part to the positive outcome of the war” and hoped, despite doubts after the fall of Stalingrad, for a final victory:
I believed despite the challenging military situation that everyone should continue to carry out his duty and that it was crucial to suppress any manifestations of subversion by all appropriate means…. Even though the military situation continued to deteriorate over the years, I kept up my faith until the enemy crossed the River Rhine and I remained convinced every soldier should do his duty and shut his mouth.3
For example, when presiding over a case against a passed midshipman accused of desertion and absence without leave that eventually, and perhaps unexpectedly, resulted in a “not guilty” verdict, Meinert leaned into one of his two military jurors with the words, “If you dare find in favor of the defendant, I will make sure you will not rise above the rank of passed midshipman yourself.”4
Still, despite undisguised endorsements of the political and ideological mission of the naval justice system such as these, Meinert felt genuine sympathy for the former U-boat commander now under his care:
Kusch pursued many intellectual interests and had extraordinary gifts as an artist. During his detention he completed many drawings, including one showing his whole life in a sequence of scenes.5 These drawings were very moving. For these reasons I have often mentioned among comrades that it was really a shame that it should have come to this. I had sincere human feelings for him.
Meinert liked to emphasize that he was not responsible for Kusch’s death sentence and had only been tasked with supervising its implementation. When it came to his censoring letters to and from Kusch, to limiting access for visitors, and to committing several related chicaneries, he asserted he was simply enforcing standard regulations. Moreover, not he but guidelines from Hitler and the Naval High Command had been responsible for the harshness of the verdict.6 Fortunately, Kusch’s lawyer Gerhard Meyer-Grieben enjoyed relatively unfettered access to his client and supplied Kusch with reading and drawing materials along with news about family, friends, and the status of his case.
A certain element of Meinert’s meanness to Kusch and presumably other inmates must have sprung from personal frustration over the damage British bombs had done very recently to his home and property. In a letter to the chief naval judge of the Baltic Command on January 24, 1944, just two days before the trial and while Kusch was already in his custody, Meinert wrote:
I hereby reiterate the oral report of January 5, 1944, that I had given to district magistrate Hoje at the time. My townhouse at Niebuhrstrasse 18 has been severely damaged by bombs. The greater part of our furniture has been torn apart by the blast, doors and windows are blown out, walls have caved in, and the plaster has come down from the ceilings, so that we cannot live there anymore. The other half of the house has collapsed down to the ground level. I presently live at the Villa “Forsteck” (above the offices) at Niemannsweg 178. I have managed to find housing for my family in Bad Segeberg.7
Both the tender Erwin Wassner with its floating offices for naval justice officials as well as Meinert’s temporary refuge at Villa Forsteck would be gone within months of Kusch’s trial, both victims of Allied aerial attacks.8 The Wassner sank on July 24 and Villa Forsteck was bombed and destroyed on August 26, 1944, exactly seven months after the trial.9 Today merely the villa’s foundations remain in what became Diederichsen Park in 1958, its generous promenade and benches inviting visitors to linger and enjoy the same majestic view across the bay that had attracted Heinrich Adolph Meyer’s fancy so long ago.10 Bombing attacks on Kiel grew so fierce by July 1944 that the entire court made plans to evacuate to the town of Plön in more rural surroundings east of Kiel.11
Even though his prison eluded Allied bombs, in some of his drawings, for example “Cell No. 107, Naval Detention Center, with Inmate” of March 15, 1944, Kusch himself has left a hauntingly depressing picture of what his room looked like. The walls were thick, and the only natural light entered through one small window high up near the ceiling with vertical and horizontal metal bars through which there could be no escape. Three-quarters of a century later, those very windows at or just below ground level, with the same bars and in danger of being overgrown by bushes and weeds, remain visible from the outside of the four-story structure that was converted into a government office building after the war and functioned as such until recently. Narrow, numbered doors with the warning “Watch your step!” lead down into the former cells from an equally narrow and poorly lighted corridor—the same one Kusch must have walked down on the way to his execution.12 The furniture in his cell consisted of a metal bunk, a wardrobe, a wooden desk with a drawer, a chair, a stool, a small closet for personal sanitary items, a water jug, a bucket, and a broom. It is not known how Kusch received his meals, whether he could shower, and whether he was allowed access to fresh air and recreation or much contact with other prisoners. When not sleeping or contemplating his fate, Kusch spent most of his hours reading, writing letters, and working on his sketches. He signed all his works with the letter “K” inside a capital “O.”13
On February 5, 1944, Kusch’s file reached for review the Gerichtsherr, that is, the Leader of U-Boats in the West, Captain Hans-Rudolf Rösing in Angers in France, with the request “to inform the Naval High Command by teletype of his opinion regarding clemency” for Kusch.14 By then the folder contained also a sealed envelope in which Kusch’s three judges—Hagemann, Dittmers, and Westphalen—had indicated their views regarding possible clemency for Kusch. Postwar testimony has revealed that both Dittmers and Westphalen recommended commutation of the death sentence to service in a penal company at the front as an ordinary soldier. The envelope carried the instruction “Only to be opened by the Naval High Command” and, unsealed but empty, remains today in Kusch’s file.15
Whether Rösing conferred for his assessment of the case with Kusch’s flotilla commander Ernst Kals in nearby Lorient, or with Werner Winter as Kusch’s former commanding officer and then chief of the First U-Boat Flotilla up in Brest, or anyone else on his staff besides Breinig, is not recorded. Rösing’s decision, coming as it did from a close associate and confidant of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, would mark a crucial fork in the path that could lead either to a reprieve and a chance for Kusch to live, or to his execution. Considering the matter for less than a day, Rösing chose the latter option without a single word of explanation. He had Breinig inform the Naval High Command in Berlin on January 6 that he was “not in favor of any form of clemency.”16 The German naval historian Heinrich Walle must have had Rösing prominently in mind when he wrote fifty years later:
In considering the [postwar] testimony of all those who shared responsibility for Kusch’s death, it strikes one as noteworthy that none of them exhibited the slightest sign of feeling guilty for what had happened. At most one encountered a kind of indifferent regret, as if with a shrug of the shoulders, that they had to send this previously so exemplary and irreproachable U-boat commander to his death. It is furthermore remarkable that everyone responsible for the death penalty or for the refusal to grant clemency conveniently attempted to place blame on those higher up in the chain of command, on unfortunate but immutable circumstances, on the need to maintain and boost discipline, or on the prevailing laws that had to be strictly enforced. No one ever examined the actual impact of Kusch’s utterances on the behavior of his men on U-154 or asked what actually happened aboard the boat…. Rösing declared in his testimony in May 1949 that Abel’s way of filing his report had been inappropriate. “Had he chosen a different way, who knows what might have happened?” Apart from the fact that [Rösing, Dittmers, and Westphalen] tried to justify their decisions as predetermined by circumstances beyond their control, their comments also contain a curious contradiction. If Kusch had indeed been guilty of a major military transgression, it would have been Abel’s absolute duty and responsibility to report it.17
With Rösing’s refusal to do anything in Kusch’s defense, the file moved to the Naval High Command in Berlin, placing the matter squarely into the lap of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his legal team. In anticipation of this event, Kusch’s defense counsel Gerhard Meyer-Grieben had already indicated upon receipt of the written justification of the verdict that he would continue to represent Kusch and submit his own required response to Berlin as soon as possible.18 He knew by then that Kusch would not make a formal plea for clemency himself as a matter of honor, principle, and out of the conviction that he had done nothing wrong. As Victor Nonn, Kusch’s former roommate at the naval academy, has stated, “The way I knew Kusch, I do not believe he would have asked for clemency.”19 Thus the seven-page document Meyer-Grieben drew up immediately, either on February 2 or 3, and apparently with Kusch’s knowledge and approval, served as a kind of substitute plea for review and leniency, a semiformal legal appeal in a system that knew no longer an independent appeal process, pointing out doubts about the correctness of the verdict and the appropriateness of the sentence.
Aware how much was at stake for his client in this literal life-and-death matter, Meyer-Grieben took special care that his objections to the way the proceedings had been conducted, the verdict that had been reached, and how Hagemann’s justification had been worded, were impeccably phrased and argued. As an extra precaution and assurance against mistakes or missing pertinent legal points in favor of his client, however minor, Meyer-Grieben asked Lieutenant Dieter Berger in Berlin to contact Kurt Gollnick, the prominent lawyer in the capital who had refused to take Kusch’s case two weeks before, for a second opinion on the wording. This time Gollnick cooperated and transmitted the edited pages to Kusch’s lawyer in Kiel forthwith. Then Meyer-Grieben took another extraordinary step. Not trusting the postal system to deliver his appeal safely in the midst of Allied aerial attacks on both Kiel and Berlin, and to make sure it reached Dönitz’s legal department before the weekend, he employed his wife as a personal courier. On Friday, February 4, Frau Meyer-Grieben boarded the first train from Kiel to Berlin long before sunrise, hand-delivered the envelope to the Naval High Command, obtained a receipt, met briefly with Dieter Berger’s family, and was back in Kiel after nightfall that evening.20 Clearly Kusch had no reason to fear his lawyer was slowing down or had given up on efforts to save his life.
Unfortunately, the document in question no longer exists. Meyer-Grieben’s copy was lost in a bomb attack on Kiel that burned his office down later in 1944. It never became a part of Kusch’s official file or was removed from it at some point. Nor is it available among the surviving records of the Naval High Command (OKM) at Germany’s military archives in Freiburg or in the holdings of Gollnick’s law firm in Berlin.21 Thus it remains difficult to reconstruct the formal legal objections to the nature, course, and outcome of the case put forth by Kusch’s defense lawyer for consideration by the legal staff at OKM, including ultimately Dönitz himself.
In the meantime, while rumors of Abel’s report and Kusch’s conviction and death sentence spread by word of mouth among stunned fellow submarine commanders and the wider naval officer corps, his former skippers on U-103 once again took the lead in fighting for Kusch’s cause and did so without delay. Both Werner Winter and Gustav-Adolf Janssen knew Dönitz very well, were not reluctant to go straight to the top outside regular channels, and had a sense that urgent intervention was of the essence to prevent the worst. About two weeks after the trial, probably on the weekend of February 12, Lieutenant Janssen and Kusch’s old friend Kurt Wiemer had a talk in the lobby of the Claridge Hotel in the rue François Premier near the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The following are Wiemer’s recollections of their meeting as put to paper two years later:
Herr Janssen related to me in great detail what had happened at the trial and the course of a conversation he had had with Dönitz about it a few days later. I can remember our talk as if it had taken place just a few weeks ago, except for the names of a few cities that I can no longer recall….
This is what Lieutenant Janssen told me: “After the trial and the announcement of the death sentence it became clear to me that I had to undertake everything in my power to save Oskar Kusch. I at once tried to ascertain Dönitz’s whereabouts and learned that he was staying at one of our bases on the Atlantic. There [in Lorient] I indeed met up with him, and since I had been his former aide-de-camp it was not difficult to get an appointment to see him. Dönitz asked me if I was in a great hurry because otherwise I might accompany him in his car on the trip back to Berlin…. On this ride I described to him the course of the trial. Unfortunately, as a junior officer it was not possible for me to criticize the manner in which the proceedings had been conducted because in that case I would have thrown doubt on the objectivity and fairness of the court. As a result, I had to restrict my remarks in defense of my former I.W.O. and friend … to efforts to convince Dönitz of Kusch’s soldierly and personal qualities as I had come to know them during many months together on board of our submarine. I did suggest that the court had been unfamiliar with these personal traits and strengths of the defendant and as a result had reached the harsh verdict.
“At first Dönitz reacted in a decidedly negative and even angry manner. But I kept pressing my point relentlessly and in the end when we parted Dönitz told me: ‘Janssen, I find it awfully decent of you to speak up on the boy’s behalf. I will arrange for him to see me so I can have a good look into his heart. We will then take matters from there.’
“I was very happy about the outcome of my talk with Dönitz. The way I knew him, I could now be assured that he would do everything to push for clemency and leniency in Oskar Kusch’s case.”
Janssen was so convinced that Dönitz would keep his word that he succeeded in the end even to dispel my [Wiemer’s] doubts about promises of such a kind. These statements are true to the best of my knowledge and conscience, and I will gladly swear an oath to that effect.22
Erwin Rau, a Crew 37a comrade of Oskar Kusch, reported a slightly different version of this conversation in 1984:
Many years ago I mentioned the Kusch case to the late Gustav-Adolf Janssen…. He told me he had asked Dönitz to allow him to share a car ride from Lorient to Berlin with him and that he tried during the entire trip to dissuade Dönitz from enforcing the death penalty on Kusch. Dönitz, however, rejected the idea out of hand and stated he had to set down an example as a warning to others.23
Commander Werner Winter was no less eager than Janssen to express to the Grand Admiral his displeasure about the course of the trial and his horror over the sentence. Immediately upon the conclusion of the trial he wrote a letter to Dönitz imploring him to do everything in his power to allow clemency to prevail:
Later Dönitz sent me back a personal reply to the effect that under the prevailing circumstances he was simply unable to do anything for Kusch. I believe I can infer from the letter that Dönitz did regret the verdict. Personally, I was shocked by the sentence. I believe Dönitz, whom I know personally very well, would have done more if his hands had not been tied, if the verdict had been different.24
According to Winter, fellow officers regarded Abel’s and Druschel’s actions as “uncomradely and despicable,” while a staff officer at U-Boat Command noted in his memoirs, “we were sad about the denunciation and the verdict, but our losses at the front and the air attacks on Kiel overshadowed the case; the public was not aware of it at all.”25 Significantly Ulrich Abel, whose sole stated goal in filing his report had been to remove Kusch from command of a U-boat, never contacted the court or Dönitz with a request to spare his former commander’s life. Neither did Kurt Druschel or Arno Funke.
Kusch’s family and friends were no less active and determined to save him than his naval comrades. While little is known about the reaction of Kusch’s father to Oskar’s predicament at the time, his fierce postwar determination to bring Hagemann, Dittmers, Westphalen, and their surviving superiors to justice for having committed or abetted a judicial murder based on purely political motives, and to rehabilitate his son’s name, honor, and legacy, strongly suggest that he used his presence in Berlin to influence the review of the case at Naval Command. Kusch’s mother traveled twice to Kiel to speak with her son, and Inge von Foris was later allowed to visit her fiancé once despite Meinert’s usual objections and interference. Oskar Kusch had no further relatives on his father’s side of the family and only a distant niece on his mother’s.
Not surprisingly the ubiquitous Dieter Berger spearheaded efforts to raise Kusch’s spirits through regular letters and exerted pressure on Dönitz and his legal department to let fairness and leniency prevail:
After the verdict against Kusch his friends went into action to obtain a reprieve to save his life. In the course of these efforts Lieutenant Janssen spoke with Dönitz and received the assurance that he would review the file in Kusch’s favor and have the case tried again based on the statements by Lieutenant Commander Winter and Lieutenant Janssen that the original proceedings had been biased and one-sided. On the very day of Kusch’s execution Admiral Godt [Rear Admiral Eberhard Godt of the U-Boat Command’s operational division] assured me that the verdict would not be enforced without a new trial. Shortly thereafter the sentence was carried out.26
Another close friend from their days in the bündisch youth ten years before, Wolfgang Kühns-Bernsau, traveled to Kiel to see what could be done:
After the death penalty had been announced, I went to Kiel with Frau Brockmann, my friend’s divorced mother, to see Oskar and to gain a personal impression of the circumstances there. The sentence seemed unaccountably harsh and went far beyond what the prosecutor had asked for…. None of the experts whom I queried about the naval justice system could understand or explain how the verdict had come about. I then spoke to Hagemann … aboard a warship [Erwin Wassner] in the port of Kiel and came away with this impression: In the course of our conversation which lasted maybe thirty minutes he appeared extremely cautious, evasive, and negative. His comments—for example that the case would be carefully reviewed “as a matter of routine” and that all mitigating circumstances would naturally be taken into consideration—were obviously meant to belittle his involvement in the matter and to obscure to interested parties the true motives behind the verdict. As it turned out, nobody offered any satisfactory explanations until we heard from the attorney Mr. Meyer-Grieben in Kiel that the sentence had been carried out. In my opinion [Abel] must have had a personal motive to get rid of a difficult comrade. Hagemann himself was known in naval circles as an unpleasant superior and fanatical National Socialist. As the verdict proves, his legal interpretations and decisions and his take on what constitutes the duties of the state were driven by his identification with Nazi ideology. There was nothing humane about his understanding of justice.27
Much the same could be said about Ernst Meinert, Kusch’s warden and daily nemesis at the Naval Detention Center, who apparently saw in his prisoner little more than a hardened criminal and opponent of the regime awaiting just punishment.
Kusch expressed his mood, hopes, and anxieties during his incarceration primarily in the form of artistic sketches and dozens of handwritten letters, many of which have survived either as part of his file or remain in the hands of their recipients and their descendants. In his bureaucratic overreach, Meinert compiled a list of thirty-eight letters Kusch either wrote or received between March 8 and May 7, 1944, meticulously recording the names and addresses of senders and recipients.28 No such list exists for the first six weeks of his detention or for the days immediately preceding his execution. In total Kusch may have composed or received more than sixty letters, all of them censored by Meinert and many confiscated if their contents revealed too much sympathy for the prisoner and his cause. For Meinert the very notion that someone would want to communicate with the dangerous criminal in Cell No. 107 appears to have been ipso facto proof of that person’s critical and potentially harmful view of the regime.
A quantitative analysis of Kusch’s known correspondence reveals an interesting pattern. Fifteen letters involved family members, including his fiancée Inge von Foris (4) his mother (4), his father (4), as well as Inge’s brother Lieutenant Henning von Foris (2), her father Colonel Bernhard von Foris (1), and her favorite grandmother Mala (1). Thirteen letters came from or went out to friends from his youth movement days, among them 3 each to or from Dieter Berger and Kurt Wiemer. Another 9 involved either fellow naval officers or crewmembers of U-154. In 7 cases the exact relationship between Kusch and the correspondent could not be ascertained and may have included the widows or parents of friends from his Südlegion days who had been killed during the war or had been captured by the enemy. Only in his very last letters does it appear as if Kusch had resigned himself to his fate. Until then he expressed regret about his situation but never remorse and maintained hope for a modification of his sentence. As he wrote to his father a week after his trial, “Now we have to wait and see what course fate has in store. Let us hope it is a favorable one.”29
Kusch often pondered the discrepancy between Abel’s and Druschel’s charges and what had actually happened aboard his boat in terms of a diminished fighting spirit or impaired combat readiness. A month after his conviction, he addressed two similarly worded letters to former members of U-154’s crew, one each to his navigator and III.W.O. on the first patrol, Heinrich Lüdmann, and to his chief radio operator at the time, Hans Janker. Both letters remain in Kusch’s file to this day because Meinert considered them subversive and never allowed them to reach their addressees. Here are Kusch’s lines to his former navigator:
Dear Lüdmann—first of all many thanks for your letter of January 14 that only reached me a few days ago…. Perhaps you have heard in the meantime about the events involving our good old “U-Sunshine.” If not, here is a short summary. When I returned from my leave on January 20, I was arrested in Lorient. While I was gone, and without my knowledge, Lieutenants Abel, Druschel and the new II.W.O. [Funke] had filed a report against me containing the harshest of accusations of a political nature. They had to do with remarks I had allegedly made on board, listening to foreign broadcasts, and similar matters. On January 26, I was put on trial in Kiel for subverting the military spirit. Based on witness testimony, etc., that I was unable to refute completely, the court regarded the charges as proven and imposed the death penalty on me for “undermining the fighting spirit and discipline” without considering mitigating circumstances. As you can see, Lüdmann, one can descend very quickly from the status of a U-boat commander to being a delinquent, or at least a prison inmate. From your experiences on our patrol together you can judge for yourself how badly I ruined the fighting spirit of our boat and undercut the discipline on board. I am sure if one were to ask the crewmembers about this matter, a very different picture would emerge compared to the one presented by Abel and Druschel. Well, one can do nothing about that at the moment. I have been here at the Naval Detention Center since January 27 and am waiting for either the confirmation of the verdict or a pardon. Right now the matter rests with the Naval High Command and it will take a few more weeks before they reach a decision. You can probably imagine my situation here in prison. An old mariner and U-boat commander like me in jail—incredible! And all that based on a verdict for something so ridiculous and ignominious. Yes, it is bitter and hard even to think about it. Should you happen to be in Kiel, I would very much appreciate if you could see me or write to me. A visitor permit can be obtained on the Erwin Wassner. Nothing much positive to report about the most recent patrol—plenty of enemy aircraft, long stretches of time spent submerged, etc. Still, let us hope the whole thing will have a favorable outcome…. Kindly accept the best wishes for yourself and your wife from your former commanding officer. Oskar Kusch.30
Kusch repeated his characterization of U-154 as “U-Sunshine” in his note to Janker and added at the end, “I had planned to get married, but that is now out of the question.”31
Several days later Ernst Meinert was at it again, this time confiscating an incoming letter from Dieter Berger dated March 1. In fact, Meinert had a copy made of the letter with the intention of reporting Berger to his superiors on the charge that a German Luftwaffe lieutenant should not express sympathy for a criminal convicted of eroding his men’s fighting spirit and discipline. Berger, who had lost one of his arms in combat against the Soviet Union, had typed the letter with one finger:
Dear Oskar! So far I have been unable to write to you for reasons I cannot specify here, but I also was reluctant to do so because my inner bond to you is so strong that a letter written in the knowledge that a third person will peruse it is hardly worth writing.
But just now you have spoken to me in your strongest language—your pictures—and I have to respond.
Inge [von Foris] just left, it is late, and I am sitting in my pajamas on the edge of my bed after I had walked Inge to the [metro station]…. I had taken out the large folder with your sketches, looked through them once more, and then turned out the light. But as I lay awake in the darkness I heard you speak to me, and so I am sitting up again and am typing this first letter to you since I last saw you in Kiel.
Those pictures, Oskar! You have such an immense power of expression and your soul speaks from them with such purity and clarity—my God, others must understand it just as easily.
Until now I thought that in our age we cannot produce genuine art anymore because real art grows from our subconscious, from the depths of one’s soul. Art today is mostly the product of a deliberate process and is intentionally created. But your pictures have taught me differently and I now know that you still have much to say to others when you project your personality outward upon a sheet of paper.
Always remember what I told you before each of your patrols: that nothing can harm you because you still have to fulfill a mission in life and no one dies before he has done so. Just as Rembrandt simply could not have been born without arms, so you will follow down your path despite all seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
I believe in you and your destiny and you should do so as well. God is only a word to remind us that life is ultimately incomprehensible, but to believe in God means there is a purpose to our life even if we are incapable of understanding it. His ways are not our ways.
Alas, Oskar, my words do not have the power of expression that your sketches have, but I am sure you will understand what I am trying to say, just as you did so long ago in the Pompeji Bar [in Berlin-Schöneberg] where we first spoke to each other.
It is almost midnight. In a few days I will visit you again. I just do not know when exactly I can get away from here. I will then tell you what is so difficult to put down in a letter, since a letter can be no more than a brief extract of what one really means to say. I am looking forward to seeing you again despite all the miserable circumstances. Heartfelt regards. Dieter.32
Kusch’s growing gloom, the first signs of becoming resigned to his fate, and certainly his longing for happier times past, speak strongly from these lines he sent to his Crew 37a comrade Karl Otto (Karlo) Flindt and another friend on March 8, 1944:
The irrevocable decision is coming closer and closer. Its deadly seriousness and its significance cast their shadows over every day and every hour. I am trying hard to prepare myself for the moment when there can be no more doubt about the outcome. It is bitter and hard, especially when I imagine such a wretched and shameful end. That is the worst. How often did we have to face death out at sea through air attacks, depth charges, and all the other challenges of U-boat warfare, but it is quite a different thing to suffer death in such a miserable manner. How happy I would be if I could be back out there on my boat. Given the crammed confines and loneliness of my prison cell such longings are particularly agonizing and painful. You know only too well that being an officer meant everything for me. But that is all over now. It is so bitter that I wish my thoughts would not come back to it all the time. Never again taking your men out to sea, never to be in charge of a submarine again! If they only could give me a boat now! What all could I accomplish now with all my experience and expertise, as I demonstrate to them that the picture they have of me is completely wrong. I believe and know that everyone would be better off that way than if the sentence were to be carried out, above all the U-boat service and the state. But that is out of the question now; it is too late. So I am confined to do the only thing left to me—to gather the strength to face my fate with dignity and composure. I very much hope I can display those traits when it counts. But one never knows ahead of time. One can only hope and beg that it will be so.33
Of all the officers aboard U-154, the only one who ever made an attempt to contact Kusch during his incarceration was Dr. Nothdurft. From distant Heidelberg he inquired on March 17 whether Meinert could forward a letter to Kusch on his behalf since he was not sure of the proper address or procedure.34 Whether Meinert did as asked—Nothdurft, after all, had signed the request with “Heil Hitler!”—or whether he withheld the letter, is not recorded. Certainly, Kusch never responded to the man who tried to help him but, in the process, created so much more harm than good.
On April 1, 1944, Ernst Meinert’s unkindness and spitefulness reached a new low point when he returned to Inge von Foris’ brother Henning a letter the army lieutenant had written to his prospective brother-in-law a week before from Wetzlar:
We are herewith returning to you the letter you had written to Lieutenant Kusch. If it is true that you are familiar with the reasons why he has been charged and sentenced, it is to be expected from you as a German officer that you distance yourself from him as soon as possible and discontinue any contacts you might have had with him…. It seems more than curious that a German officer with any sense of honor should have written such a letter to someone who has received the death penalty and has been stripped of every right to wear a military uniform. Should you make a second attempt to get in touch with K., we will report you to your superiors to enable them to take additional measures against you. In the present case no further action will be taken for special reasons.35
After the war, Gerhard Meyer-Grieben criticized Meinert’s attitudes and behavior sharply, citing the revealing comment on Meinert’s part that “Kusch’s friends apparently viewed his deed as a trivial matter,” and that “no government could tolerate such an interpretation because otherwise ‘we would cut off the very branch on which we are sitting.’”36 Around the same time, in 1946, Meyer-Grieben wrote the following in a letter to prosecutor Robert W. M. Kempner at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg:
Mr. Meinert was a convinced National Socialist who created great difficulties when it came to Kusch’s communications with friends and family. He complained about the letters that went back and forth, confiscated some of these and sent them on to the Naval High Command in Berlin in order to influence the review process of Kusch’s case in a negative way. In the end he ordered all visits by Kusch’s friends and family to cease, except for those of his mother. On several occasions I complained about his actions. He told me he could not tolerate that a defendant who had been convicted for political reasons was allowed to maintain amicable relations with his chums who were likewise opposed to the political system. Failing to prevent such contacts would bring about the end of the regime.37
Two months into his detention Kusch himself had become so annoyed and enraged over the pesky justice official that on March 29 he lodged an official complaint over Meinert’s arbitrary and narrow-minded censorship practices:
At the end of February I wrote three letters from the naval detention center that the court has taken exception to. Since I believe the objections are based on misunderstandings of what I was trying to express in those letters, allow me to offer an explanation. Since no specific objectionable passages were pointed out to me … I can only assure the court that none of my letters had a subversive purpose. Any poorly chosen phrases can be traced to the depressive state in which I found myself after the verdict and that may have colored the letters here and there in a minor way as they were overwhelmingly of an informational nature.38
Kusch goes on to explain a particular passage in a confiscated letter to a Miss Bischoff in Lübeck in which he had stated he hoped to resume creating “beautiful” drawings after completing his time in the penitentiary:
I did not write the phrase in question to indicate that I expected to spend a few years in the penitentiary and then resume doing my sketches. Rather, using self-irony and bitterness while fully aware of my circumstances, I meant to point out the exact opposite, namely, my impossibility of ever creating something “beautiful” again. The court concluded from this passage that I am not aware of the seriousness of my situation. I would like to assure the court that the serious nature of my situation has always been perfectly clear to me and that I never meant to misrepresent that fact or my prospects…. At the same time, and especially since I am expecting the confirmation of my sentence in the very near future, I am asking the court’s permission for my fiancée, Ms. von Foris, to visit me. I would like to discuss and arrange with her a number of personal and practical matters before the sentence is carried out. I am asking for this favor exactly because I am aware how serious and urgent my situation is.39
Meinert noted at the bottom of the letter, “Defendant’s counsel Meyer-Grieben has been notified that a one-time permission to visit will be granted.” Whether Kusch desired to delay this last encounter with Inge for as long as possible before facing the inevitable, whether Meinert placed additional bureaucratic obstacles in his path, or whether he perhaps needed more time to sort out in his mind what to tell Inge, is no longer ascertainable. At any rate, not until three weeks later on April 18 did Meyer-Grieben formally request and obtain this permit for Inge to speak to her fiancé for the last time on the morning of Thursday, April 20, 1944.40 It would not have escaped the young couple that this final meeting—their first since parting in Zürs three months before—fell on Hitler’s fifty-fifth birthday.
No account of their last meeting exists either in ink or in charcoal. Given the cold and depressing surroundings at the detention center, it must have lacked any sense of privacy or intimacy. At least Kusch was allowed to wear civilian clothes rather than prison garb since his sentence was still awaiting confirmation. How far ahead their thoughts and plans extended into the future, if at all, can only be guessed. It is quite likely that Oskar gave Inge on this occasion additional items for safekeeping, including some of his artwork and his correspondence. A letter from Gerhard Meyer-Grieben to Ernst Meinert on June 26, 1944, some six weeks after Kusch’s death, throws some light on the issue:
The award certificates for his decorations can no longer be located. His relatives (mother) do not have them. As far as the mother recalls the certificates were transferred to his fiancée when Kusch was on leave in Berlin in 1943. The apartment at the Heydtstrasse where she lived at the time belonged to Lieutenant Commander von Foris [correct: Lt. Cdr. Walter Klusemann, Inge’s stepfather] and has been destroyed by the enemy. On that occasion the certificates were likely destroyed as well, along with the other papers of the deceased (his commission as an officer, his correspondence, his library, etc.).41
Even earlier Kusch had notified his flotilla commander and the navy’s personnel office that he had lost his pay book during his vacation in Zürs.42
Kusch’s surviving drawings from this time confirm how frequently and how profoundly Inge and recollections of their weeks together in the Austrian Alps occupied his mind. At the same time, they reflect notions of deep despair and impending doom. Between March 15 and April 7, just as he requested a last meeting with Inge, he created a sequence of three sketches he collectively labeled “Zürser Bilderbogen,” or “picture memories of Zürs,” and dedicated them to a mysterious recipient identified only as “das Mariechen.”43 Whether this was an intimate nickname for Inge only the two of them could have known, or was someone else altogether, remains unclear, but it obviously was a female who had been with them in Austria or whom they had met there. At any rate, the first and most positive and optimistic of the sketches shows four scenes: Oskar and Inge on their skis being pulled uphill by a lift as he holds her close to him; Oskar standing in Inge’s hotel room door and gently waking her up in the morning after what must have been a long but happy night out; both of them dancing exuberantly to “swing” music, presumably at a bar or club; and a concerned Inge trying to cheer Oskar up as he pensively embraces a miniature merry-go-round with the inscription, “It goes around and around and around.”
His vision of life and of his relationship with Inge as a merry-go-round also dominates his sketch of April 2 titled “Das Karussel.” Except for a ragged body swinging from one of three gallows while vultures lurk in the distance, the upper section of the drawing, above the busy and crowded merry-go-round and a pavilion in the center, is all happiness: a warm sun shining on Inge and Oskar as they enjoy a lover’s kiss; another dance scene with Inge in high heels and a fashionable dress showing off her legs to the audience and to her admiring beau all spiffy in a coat and tie; and, slightly smaller and less distinct, Inge and Oskar emerging through a portal after their wedding, she all in white and he in a formal coat, tie, and a silk hat. The lower third of the drawing stands in total contrast to the other scenes and is hauntingly disturbing. It is dominated by the “Grim Reaper” in the form a hovering skeleton illuminated by two flickering candles to his right. An adjacent scene to the left shows Kusch, his head lowered in shame and steadying himself with a cane or ski pole, being escorted into a waiting horse-drawn carriage by a man in a dark coat and otherwise unidentifiable as his body is turned away from the viewer—an allusion to how his sojourn in Zürs ended for him. Lastly, in the right-hand lower corner of the sketch a face, all pale and its eyes wide with horror, peers through a barred window at the dead body of a man outside lying prostrate with a dagger stuck in his chest. The window with its bars and surrounding brickwork is a perfect replica of the basement windows, eerily unchanged to this day, of the naval detention center in Kiel.
The third panel of this triptych of sorts is titled “The Wanderer between Both Worlds” and is a further testament to Kusch’s literary and artistic erudition as well as his enduring rootedness in the cosmos and traditions of the bündisch youth movement. Inspired both by Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic painting “Wanderer above a Sea of Fog” of 1818 and by Walter Flex’s World War I novel of 1916 so popular in the 1920s and 1930s when he grew up, Kusch depicts himself as meditative and bareheaded in his naval uniform gazing into the distance before the vastness of an Alpine landscape while below him he and Inge and another couple are shown dancing away the night in oblivion and abandonment. This quasi out-of-body experience, neither here nor there, somewhere between life and death, between heaven and earth, between now and forever, must have been symptomatic for Kusch’s condition as he pondered the stations of his life and the abyss that had opened before him.
For the two weeks after March 6, Kusch must have undergone a particularly morose mental spell, as his sketches from this period reveal with terrifying clarity and intensity. Drawing inspiration from Greek mythology, the Old and New Testaments, Dante’s Inferno, and other, more elusive sources, Kusch’s imagination projects him into the midst of a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and dark, good and evil, from which there is neither rescue nor escape. Words cannot match the artistic power of his stark and apocalyptic projections. Some of the sketches replicate aspects or effects of well-known masterpieces. For example, a self-portrait of March 7 depicts Kusch, his empty eyes wide open, his hair falling wildly onto his forehead, his mouth ajar in impotent protest, and with his hands fiercely grasping the bars of his cell door, eerily similar to the central figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The next day Kusch completed “Judas,” a grim rendition of the eternally secretive, scheming, plotting, calculating, slanted-eyed enemy of all that is good, decent, and true. The fact that Ernst Meinert allowed this work to pass his censorship and leave the prison along with the rest of Kusch’s drawings indicates how well Kusch was able to disguise any outward similarities to the Judases in his life. On March 19, an infernal “Moloch” devours a huge assembly of terrified children in his vast orifice, his huge and menacingly sharp teeth spearing them mercilessly as they try to get away, including a hapless and hopeless Kusch impaled on one of the monster’s lower eyeteeth, his eyes gaping wide and his arms stretched down in desperation for a relief that never arrives. And on the very next day, March 20, the first day of his last, abbreviated spring on earth, Kusch transplants the forever damned from Canto III in Dante’s Inferno to the Kriegsmarine’s detention center in Kiel, as a large collection of faceless male prisoners, in striped garb and wearing their cell number on their backs, crosses a street into the welcoming gates of the facility. The last in the group, No. 107 of course, looks up and reads on the welcoming sign beneath the barbed-wire security fence the Italian poet’s famous line, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
In his deep and frequent preoccupation with Dante’s Inferno in those dark days of despair, Kusch was likely guided by a desire to sort into their appropriate circles of hell those who had harmed him through fraud and malice. Dante’s three major traitors (Judas, Brutus, and Cassius) may well have turned into Abel, Hagemann, and Dönitz as a slobbering Lucifer makes a meal of them at the lowest level in Canto XXXIV. Not far above, in the Malebolge of Lower Hell, one would have encountered their scheming accomplices among the flatterers, deceivers, hypocrites, sowers of discord, and other falsifiers. In Kusch’s estimation this might well have been the proper eternal place of damnation for Druschel, Funke, Nothdurft, Dittmers, Westphalen, Kals, Rösing, and Meinert, as they allowed through acts both of commission and omission a great tragedy to take its course.
By early April 1944, Kusch had every reason to begin to abandon hope for a merciful outcome of his case. By this time his file had been in the hands of the Naval High Command for nearly two months and a decision had to be imminent. Any death penalty against a Kriegsmarine officer had to be reviewed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and confirmed by Hitler—the latter step typically a mere formality. Dönitz in turn relied in his decisions heavily on the advice of the top legal official on his staff, Dr. Joachim Rudolphi, while the head of Dönitz’s administrative department, and Rudolphi’s immediate superior, General Admiral Walter Warzecha, also signed off on major decisions. Kusch’s lawyer Gerhard Meyer-Grieben later remembered and stressed the centrality of Rudolphi’s role in the review of the verdict:
Dr. Rudolphi inserted himself regularly into the process. He either signed or co-signed the pertinent documents. Dr. Rudolphi’s name was well known among defense counsels and throughout the naval justice system. We were often advised that “Dr. Rudolphi wants the matter handled this way or that way,” or “Dr. Rudolphi disagrees with this arrangement,” etc. He was the decisive official when it came to reviewing death penalty cases.44
Interestingly, Rudolphi would testify after the war that he had not been involved in the Kusch case at all as he had been on sick leave at the time and often away from Berlin on official business. According to him, he only cosigned the document confirming Kusch’s death sentence on direct orders from Dönitz because Warzecha was just then surveying bomb damage to his home and unavailable for a signature.45 Rudolphi’s postwar sworn statement would be exposed as patently false and misleading by none other than Dönitz himself, even though the jurist never suffered prosecution for perjury as a result.
Still, Dönitz must shoulder ultimate responsibility for making the decision at the Naval High Command that sent Kusch to his death. He had been aware of the case almost from the moment Abel made his report, had conferred with Captain Rösing in France as well as Admirals von Friedeburg and Godt at U-Boat Command, and heard on Kusch’s behalf from Werner Winter and especially from Lieutenant Janssen during their long car ride through France in early February. Now the file, forwarded after initial scrutiny and recommendations by Rudolphi and Warzecha, lay on his desk. While or just before serving his ten-year sentence at Spandau after the war, and apparently worried that the Kusch case might yet catch up with him in some fashion, Dönitz addressed the following undated note, probably composed in 1946 or 1947, to the former naval justice official Karl Helmut Sieber, who had taken it upon himself to help fellow naval judges weather the ongoing denazification hearings:
My recollection is as follows: Received the list of charges from the Leader of U-Boats in the West, Captain Rösing, containing the report of the officers of the boat and also of enlisted men (mate in charge of the central control room?). Trial at the court of the Higher Command for U-Boat Training. Death sentence for subverting the fighting spirit. Verdict endorsed by Gerichtsherr [Rösing] and U-Boat Command, Admiral von Friedeburg. Case file came to me. It showed Kusch, on one long patrol (or perhaps 2), had made again and again very disparaging remarks in front of his crew about the Führer, the military leadership and the prospects for winning the war. Negative effect on the boat regarding combat spirit and military discipline.
I was very impressed by the case. Simply unbelievable that something like this could have happened under the auspices of one of my own U-boat commanders! How was it possible that neither fellow submarine commanders nor the flotilla commander noticed anything and did something about it? Further discussions about the case with Godt and also with Rösing.
I kept the file in my office for a long time—about 8 to 10 days—because the case really caused me anguish and I wished I could find a way out that would have made it possible for me to modify the sentence. Held additional consultations with Admiral Warzecha and Admiralty Staff Judge Rudolphi in their capacity as the responsible officials at Naval High Command. Their unequivocal position was that the gravity of the case—subversive speeches in front of the crew while in the presence of the enemy—rendered any form of clemency out of the question. We simply could not make an exception in favor of U-boat commander Lieutenant Kusch since we had always imposed the death penalty before in similar cases, usually on enlisted personnel. Both [Warzecha and Rudolphi] were correct. The military situation in that hard last phase of the war required such a sentence. I endorsed the verdict. The Führer agreed. It was carried out.46
Notwithstanding such self-righteous justifications, the case of Oskar Kusch must have given the Grand Admiral recurring nightmares and weighed on his conscience. As late as November 30, 1968, at age seventy-seven and more than ten years after his release from prison, and without any specific occasion to worry about renewed prosecution, Dönitz addressed the following inquiry to Otto Kranzbühler, his former defense counsel at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and himself a high-ranking official in the Kriegsmarine’s naval justice apparatus before 1945:
Concerning the death sentence for Kusch, I was of the opinion in those days that we could not maintain a moral double standard. It was my duty to prevent that someone who had weakened the strength of the U-boat service ended up in the safe protection of a prison cell through a show of clemency. Especially so, if at the same time in that hardest phase of the war I demanded from our brave U-boat commanders and their crews that they gave their very best and continued to fight in order to bind vast enemy resources that would otherwise have been turned directly against our homeland, against Germany. I am thinking of the hundreds of large aircraft that otherwise would have dropped bombs on our civilian population. And these U-boat crews continued to perform their duty courageously and with great sacrifice.
Therefore, allow me to ask: Is there a legal way for the present state authorities to roll the Kusch case back out? Clearly, if I confirmed the sentence, I never did so with the intention of murdering anyone. Instead, as I have pointed out, I did so while fulfilling a difficult but necessary duty in an extraordinarily trying phase of the U-boat war when everything had to be concentrated on maintaining our strength to fight. There can be no doubt that I had the full backing and concurrence of Dr. Rudolphi and Warzecha. Should there be any question about that, I would know about it.47
Besides portraying more than twenty years after the war a vastly skewed picture of Allied resources and the actual effect of his submarines against the enemy after 1943, here Dönitz makes quite clear that no one in the official review chain—namely, Kals, Rösing, Godt, von Friedeburg, Rudolphi, Warzecha, or among those he may have consulted informally—ever lifted one finger for Kusch. He also implies he paid little or no attention to those who knew Kusch best—Winter and Janssen—or to the suggestion by Dittmers and Westphalen that the sentence be commuted to some rehabilitative service at the front. He and Rudolphi may also have been influenced by the letters Meinert forwarded to the Naval High Command to demonstrate that in detention Kusch showed no sign of changing his political views or revealed any kind of contrition for his terrible deeds. Far from wishing to grant Kusch another chance through a new trial or a lighter sentence, Dönitz had decided by then that by having Kusch executed he would set down an example as a warning to others, presumably in the sense Voltaire commented on British Admiral John Byng’s execution in 1757 by his own side as an act designed “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others). Not what Kusch had or had not done became the central criterion in Dönitz’s mind, but the need to keep up the will to victory in line with the Nazi spirit. By this reckoning, Kusch executed became more valuable than Kusch incarcerated. Dönitz never kept his promise to see Kusch and listen to his version of events. He never called him or corresponded with him, nor did any other individual involved in the review process ever seek to meet with the lonely inmate of Cell No. 107 at Kiel’s naval detention center. Naively or deliberately taking the trial record for a complete and unbiased account of what had happened on U-154, Dönitz and his subordinates allowed the myth to take root that the boat had somehow pulled out of the war under Kusch’s direction.
As a further clue to Dönitz’s thinking and hardening mindset in that spring and summer of 1944, there exists a speech he delivered a month after the failed coup attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944—some three months after refusing clemency for Kusch. A typewritten version of Dönitz’s address to high-ranking naval brass was widely distributed at the time, even though the copy once appended to the war diary of the Naval High Command was removed at some juncture before the end of the war. In Section IX of this programmatic address, Dönitz reiterated what fate awaited soldiers who had lost faith in the Führer and in a final victory:
The German armed forces must stick fanatically to the man to whom they have sworn allegiance for otherwise this Wehrmacht will go under…. Who is there besides the Führer whom we can serve unconditionally with all our soul? The [July 20] conspirators in the General Staff in the end failed precisely because they had not dedicated themselves with all their soul to the Führer. It is therefore necessary to become fully aware of these circumstances and the fact that in the midst of our current life-anddeath struggle nothing can replace our fanatical loyalty to this man and to this state. Any deviation would amount to a loosening of commitment and a crime. I would rather eat dirt than to see my grandchildren being educated in this Jewish spirit and filth and to become poisoned by it…. We therefore demand from the officer corps that it stands unconditionally behind this state and that it educates its men to absolute fanaticism. This education will and must find its fulfillment not in well-sounding speeches but in a fanatical readiness to die. Whoever does not have the wish or the will to do this, cannot rise to higher leadership positions and must be removed.48
Clearly, Kusch could not expect one ounce of understanding or mercy from a man who thought in these categories and was fully prepared to act on them.
On Monday, April 10, 1944, having received the file from Dönitz, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s official deputy as head of the German armed forces, signed Kusch’s death warrant. Göring had the last word in the matter, technically and symbolically substituting for Hitler who had been a subject of Kusch’s comments and therefore was recused. In this further act of purely legalistic conformity to the letter of the law in a substantially lawless system, it must be doubted whether Göring ever read Kusch’s file, let alone raise questions about him and his case. Certainly none are recorded. After Göring’s signature had been affixed, the documents were passed back down the chain of command. On May 8, 1944, ironically exactly one year before Germany’s surrender, a bureaucrat at Naval High Command (OKM) simply notified Captain Rösing in Angers as the Gerichtsherr in the matter that “the verdict of January 26, 1944, has been confirmed, the execution of the sentence ordered, and clemency denied.”49 At this point any additional petitions for leniency were automatically doomed. As the legal department of the Naval High Command decreed on February 26, 1944, “futile requests submitted immediately upon receipt of an execution order or the denial of clemency, unless they contain new information, are not to be considered and should be returned to the petitioner.”50
Following standard protocol, three days later, on Thursday, May 11, Ernst Meinert in Kiel issued this directive:
1. The sentence shall be carried out at 06:30 on Friday, May 12, 1944.
2. The detention center has been notified accordingly and is in charge of the preparations. Lieutenant Gerdes [name added in longhand] is in charge of the execution.
3. Naval chaplain Lucht has likewise been notified.
4. Since the case file has not yet been returned, it would be useless to convene for the night before the execution a panel of naval justice officials to deliberate in case an order is received to take up the case again. In the unlikely event that such a request should be received, the execution may have to be postponed.
5. The prisoner shall be informed at 21:30 on May 11, 1944, of the confirmation of the sentence and the time of its execution.
6. Defense counsel Meyer-Grieben has been notified in the usual manner.51
While for Meinert and others in Germany’s naval justice bureaucracy “the usual manner” may have been all too familiar, Oskar Kusch must have listened with utmost apprehension to the sound of footsteps approaching his cell door that evening. After being taken up to the main prison office, Kusch listened as Meinert informed him that the Reich Marshal, acting on behalf of the Führer, had confirmed his sentence, that no clemency would be granted, and that the execution would be carried out at 0630 in the morning. Kusch was then asked whether he had anything to declare. He answered “Nothing,” and signed the document in the prescribed place.52 He had nine more hours to live.